CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC ANCHOR: Good morning from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. Tropical storm Isaac has strengthened as it dumps heavy rains on Haiti today, prompting fears of floods and mudslides and an evacuation of thousands of tent camp dwellers yesterday. Officials also issued a hurricane warning for South Florida and the keys.

And in a conference call with Southern Baptists on Friday, former Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, lashed out at GOP leaders for trying to force Republican Congressman Todd Akin out of the Missouri Senate race after Akin`s controversial comments on rape and abortion. We`ll be talking about that in a moment.

Right now, I`m joined by Michelle Goldberg, senior contributing writer for "Newsweek" and the "Daily Beast and author of "The Means of Reproduction, Sex, power, and the Future of the World." W. Kamau Bell, comedian and host of FX`s new "Totally Bias: The W. Kamau Bell," which is fantastic. You guys should all be seen Thursday night 11 o`clock eastern, right?

Yes.

HAYES: On FX. You should definitely check that out. Katha Pollitt, my colleague at "The Nation" where she is a columnist, and Esther Armah, host of WBAI FMs "Wake Up Call" here in New York. Great to have all of you here.

The presidential campaign turned to the subject of abortion this week, not because of the candidates, but because of this exchange during a local TV interview with Missouri Senate candidate, Republican, Todd Akin.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLES JACO, HOST, "JACO REPORT": If an abortion could be considered in the case of, say, a tubal pregnancy or something like that, what about in the case of rape? Should it be legal or not?

REP. TODD AKIN, (R) MISSOURI: Well, you know, people want to try and make that as one of those things, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that`s really rare. If it`s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

But let`s assume that maybe that didn`t work or something, you know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be in the rapist and not attacking the child.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Akin would hastily apologize for his words, but it`s still worth establishing for the record that he was wrong about the rarity of pregnancy as resulting from rape. In just a one-year period from 2004 and 2005, over 3,000 pregnancies resulted from rape according to estimates of Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network.

But the deeper embedded assumption here that rape cannot truly be labeled as such if the victim becomes pregnant is not merely a bizarre misunderstanding of basic human biology. It`s an insidious myth pedaled by figures on the far-right for decades, and it`s linage can be traced back centuries to the earliest, most permanent (ph) theories about women, sexuality, and reproduction.

In the second century A.D., Roman physician Galen laid out the ground work with his theory that the reproductive systems of men and women were virtually identical. Galen wrote a genitalia, quote, turn outward the women`s, turn inward, so to speak, and full double the men`s and you will find the same in both in every respect."

The reasoning went as follows, "Since male genitals must be aroused as a pre-condition of sexual procreation, the same must be true of women. Hence, a woman cannot be inseminated against her will." That theory persisted in some form for centuries, influencing early legal theories about the relationship between pregnancy and sexual assault.

A 13th century legal text, for example, contains this passage about rape. "If the woman should have conceived at the time alleged in the appeal, the allegation abates. For without a woman`s consent, she could not conceive." Again, the false principle of the heart of this theory was that women must experience sexual arousal in order for pregnancy to occur.

If the victim became pregnant, she must have consented, thus, disproving the allegation of rape. These beliefs about reproduction and sexuality persisted into the 19th century when the British physician, Samuel Farr, wrote in the elements of medical jurisprudence, quote, "For without an excitation of lust or the enjoyment of pleasure in the venereal act, no conception can probably take place."

So that if an absolute rape could be perpetrated, it is not likely she would become pregnant. This connection between consent and pregnancy has been disproved countless times over the last half century, but nonetheless, persists to this day in certain far right circles.

As recently as 1999, for example, Dr. John Wilky, a former president of the National Right to Life Committee wrote, quote, "Assault rape pregnancies are extremely rare. There`s no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape as can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, implantation, and even nurturing of a pregnancy." Wilky is so prominent in the anti-abortion movement that in 2007, Mitt Romney said in a statement about Wilky, quote, "I am proud to have the support of a man who has meant so much to the pro-life movement."

It was Romney in 2007. Next week, on Thursday, Mitt Romney will formally accept the presidential nomination of a party whose platform explicitly calls for amending the United States constitution to outlaw abortions entirely, making no exceptions for incest, the mother`s health, or rape. So, I was sort of amazed to learn that this Akin moment had this very long intellectual pedigree.

And what strikes me about his statement -- first of all, the clause from what I understand from doctors is a great thing to append to anything, any assertion you want to make. Well, from what I --

(LAUGHTER)

HAYES: When you`re talking about the rape exception, right, the problem that people who advocate the position that Todd Akin does, Paul Ryan does, that the Republican Party advocates (ph) is that it`s a massively unpopular position. We have some polling on this, right? This is, you know, people`s feelings about abortion are very conflicted.

They`re all over the place. The polling on this, the various -- tremendously based on how do you ask the question. But, when you get to the polls, right, on the scale of policy, you find massive unpopularity of -- for both ends, right? If you say full abortion -- right to abortion up until, you know, late into the third trimester, that`s a very unpopular position, whether right or not.

And if you say illegal under any circumstances, that`s very unpopular, right? Illegal under any circumstances, that`s 20 percent position. The republicans and conservatives are in a position of having to defend that.

And so, there`s this kind of way in which this idea about rape, pregnancy, being impossible is a way of reverse engineering away this very difficult repudiation, this kind of signal of moral revulsion we all feel after a thought of a woman who`s been raped forcing --

MICHELLE GOLDBERG, THEDAILYBEAST.COM: And the best face, I think, you can put on this or the most empathetic towards the Todd Akins of the world is that maybe he cannot quite come to terms with the cruel implications of his position. You know, he kind of does not want to face what it is that he`s kind of forcing on rape victims.

That to me -- because in a way, if you do accept it, if you do accept the biology, if you do accept the fact that women do regularly become pregnant as a result of rape, then how do you explain to those women that you are going to force them against their will to carry that pregnancy to term?

HAYES: Right, Well, I`ll tell you how to explain. Here`s Paul Ryan being asked about that on Thursday, right? Paul Ryan as someone who has co-signed legislation with Todd Akin, believes abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, and here he is explaining that, you know, and justify (ph).

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. PAUL RYAN, (R) VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I`m very proud of my pro-life record, and I`ve always adopted the idea the position that the method of concept doesn`t change the definition of life. But let`s remember, I`m joined the Romney/Ryan ticket, and the president makes policy.

And the president, in this case, the future president, Mitt Romney has exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother which is a vast improvement of where we are right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: The method of conception, I mean, this is the moral reasoning and heart. And I actually --

KATHA POLLITT, THENATION.COM: They said the method of conception.

HAYES: Well, right. But I mean --

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: Well, right, exactly. That at least gets the biology right, which is an improvement over Todd Akin. But that to me is -- that`s the argument for no exceptions, and that is the argument of the Republican Party right now, right?

GOLDBERG: But -- I`ve had this -- I mean, I had arguments with anti-abortion activists before where one of the things that strikes me about not just Paul Ryan here, but everything Paul Ryan`s ever written about abortion is the extent to which the woman is completely absent from the discussion.

You know, he writes these essays and doesn`t mention the word woman once. And so, these Republicans, you know, tend to believe that taxation is theft, they tend to believe -- they tend to be against eminent to domain, they are certainly -- you know, our constitution is founded on the principle that you can`t force people to quarter soldiers in their home, in your home against their will.

HAYES: -- Third Amendment shout out only eight minutes into the show.

GOLDBERG: Right. But, they do believe that women should be forced, in a certain sense, whether or not the metaphysical question about the beginning of life is not completely germane to whether or not that life has the right to reside in you against your will.

POLLITT: Isn`t it sort of like a soldier being quartered in our (ph) home?

GOLDBERG: And so, what people have argued when I said this is they say, well, to -- by kind of putting yourself in that situation you have implicitly opened yourself up.

HAYES: Yes. My feeling about this is that I can understand -- I actually understand the view of -- I mean, what I think is useful about this moment in American politics both in terms of what Todd Akin said and about the fact that the platform that Paul Ryan`s nomination, Todd Akin`s comment, and then the platform coming out, which we`re going to talk about in greater depth tomorrow are clarifying in terms of where the Republican Party is on this issue.

They are in the most maximalistly extreme part of the issue on one side and I think that`s clarifying. And in fact, I would even say this. I understand that view, and I understand the pro-choice view, which I, myself, hold very dearly, better than I understand the middle view, which says it`s -- it should be illegal, but if it`s rape, it should be legal because why?

I don`t understand. If you grant that it`s a life in the beginning, then have you this method of conception argument.

W. KAMAU BELL, HOST, "TOTALLY BIASED": I just would like to say on behalf of all men, I think we need to shut up.

(LAUGHTER)

BELL: I really feel like I`ve seen more men on TV talking about when women should and shouldn`t conceive or when women -- and it`s like just shut up, dudes.

It really points to the patriarchal system of this country that men feel such a right to talk about things that have nothing to do with them, because I certainly -- as a black person, I`m happy that we stop saying where Black people could and couldn`t go in this country, and I feel the same way to just doing that with women right now, you know?

HAYES: Yes. It is --

BELL: I`m sorry. Since the 13th century as I --

HAYES: Katha.

POLLITT: I think that the view that says you can have an abortion if you`ve been raped, but not for any other circumstance, is related to the older idea of abortion, which we now -- which the pro-lifers have -- anti-choicers have pretty much dropped, which is it`s a sexual sin. It follows from wrong sex, that sex is a contract to have a baby, which, I think, would come as a huge surprise to most people who had sex.

HAYES: Right.

POLLITT: And I think that these two anti-choice ideas have gotten a little bit conflated. One, the earlier idea which is the idea of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, which abortion is wrong, because you`re not supposed to be having sex. Sex is bad. The only purpose to have sex is to have a baby. And if you have sex with any other time, you`re already committing a sin --

(CROSSTALK)

GOLDBERG: The arguments against legal abortion, initially, were all about that it was going to encourage promiscuity, not that it was going to encourage murder.

POLLITT: Right.

HAYES: I want you to hold that thought for one second, I`ll come back to you. And then I want to bring in someone who does believe that abortion should be illegal but wants to make the exception so that we can sort of zero in on where this argument is right now, right after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: We`re just talking during the break about one of the most remarkable things about the Akin comment was the fact that it just showed what the kind of bubble that he exists in, that there`s -- you know, you`ve never seen a politician more genuine in an interview than Todd Akin, you know, working his way through that question, marshaling these little known facts, and -- you said he probably walked off and thought he totally nailed it.

BELL: Yes. That was great --

(LAUGHTER)

BELL: I looked good on TV.

(LAUGHTER)

BELL: Wait until I call my family for --

HAYES: Katha, I am -- so, you`re saying there are sort of two arguments that sort of -- this argument in medieval times about encouraging sexual promiscuity about the fact that the evilness of abortion emanates from the evilness of sex outside of the procreative intent.

POLLITT: Right.

HAYES: And then, there`s obviously another more current argument, the one that we hear more often in politics.

POLLITT: Yes. It actually -- the Catholic Church really -- the pope decided that abortion was murder in 1869. This was a by-product of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, which was declared, you know, official doctrine then, along with papal infallibility. And the first thing he said was infallible was I`m infallible. So, that`s --

(CROSSTALK)

POLLITT: That`s all clear --

HAYES: Bootstrapping.

POLLITT: So, then abortion became like murder. It came a different kind of thing. And in America, I don`t think you would get very far with that earlier idea.

HAYES: About the sexual --

POLLITT: Yes.

HAYES: Because of sexual practices of (ph) America.

POLLITT: Because we just don`t live like that, and people have never lived like that. But, that aura still persists. And that`s why, for example, along with the idea that the woman is the man`s property either has been her father, the idea that there has to be -- you have to resist to the utmost which is -- was legal doctrine for a very long time in many states and a horrible miscarriage of justice were done according to that.

HAYES: The legal definition of rape?

POLLITT: The legal -- you could not -- you could not be a bona fide victim of rape, unless, you had resisted to the utmost. So, the best victim was a dead victim, because she really resisted.

HAYES: Right, right.

POLLITT: But anything short of that --

HAYES: Was suspect.

POLLITT: -- was suspect.

HAYES: I want to bring in Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America which advocates changing the party`s platform to focus on reducing the number of abortions. Kristen, I wanted to ask you first, the Democrats for Life, my understanding of the position is that abortion should be outlawed, but there should be exceptions.

And I want you to just walk me through the moral reasoning of how you get there. As I was saying before, I can understand the moral reasoning of Paul Ryan who says it`s a life, and that life is independent of, quote, "the method of conception." Obviously, I can understand the pro-choice argument. Walk me through the moral reasoning that gets you to this exception policy.

KRISTEN DAY, DEMOCRATS FOR LIFE: The exceptions were first brought into light in 1978 when Henry Hyde and Congressman Jim Oberstar first introduced the Hyde languages, said rape -- federal funding for abortion would be allowed in rape, incest, and life of the mother, because those are the most difficult cases when you`re asking a woman to carry a child to term when it`s an unplanned pregnancy.

You know, you have to provide the support behind it. And the reason that we support those exceptions is because we want to address the other 95 percent of abortions that when a woman has an unplanned pregnancy, how do we ask her to carry that pregnancy to term? And then, what do we do after that? And Democrats for Life is different from that aspect.

And that, yes, we are opposed to abortion, but we also consider ourselves pro-life, and we want to look at those aspects once the baby is born. Is there affordable child care? Is there healthcare? Is there -- how can we make sure that she has the ability to care for that child after the baby is born?

HAYES: But them -- and I hear you right that that supporting these exceptions, these three exceptions, rape, incest, life of the mother is fundamentally a political calculation about the fact that those -- no exceptions for those are so politically toxic that it`s just not worth pursuing that?

DAY: You know, for us, the reason is hard, because those cases are so difficult. And, you know, a woman who is a victim of rape has gone through a very traumatic situation. And we should -- we should have compassion for those women who go through those -- the victims, and to -- and then to find out that she`s pregnant on top of that, you know, no one can even begin to understand how difficult that would be.

And even when have you a planned pregnancy, you can, sometimes, have times of panic, how are you going to provide for this child, and to not have compassion for a woman who is a victim of rape is just the wrong stance to take until we can address the other 95 percent of abortions where women feel like they don`t have the support, they don`t have the financial capability, they don`t want to drop out of school.

So, I think we really need -- and the Democrats for Life, we think we really need (ph) to address the root reasons that women choose abortion and really address those concerns, too, because then, you know, if a woman is raped and she becomes pregnant and, you know, she does want to carry the child to term, again, we have to make sure that all of the structures are in place to make sure that she has the ability to do that.

HAYES: I want to take a moment just to read just so people know that the actual language as we have it now, this is not final. It will be ratified on Monday of the GOP platform on abortion, and then, I know you guys want to ask Kristen some questions. This is the Republican Party platform on abortion.

"We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support human life amendment to the constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the 14th Amendment`s protections, due process and like, apply to unborn children. We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortion or fund organizations which perform or advocate it and will not fund or subsidize healthcare which includes abortions coverage."

I know that you guys have some questions for Kristen, and I want you to ask those right after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Kristen Day from Democrats for Life talking about your organization`s advocacy of a physician that would outlaw abortion and also make exceptions in the cases in which the Republican platform, Paul Ryan, specifically, would not make exceptions. Although, the position, I should note is that the same position roughly that mitt Romney has advocated, who has advocated for these exceptions.

We`re talking about this, of course, because of the comments of Todd Akin this week and the kind of underlying belief system underneath the incredibly, offensively wrong headed biology in that statement. But you guys had a question for Kristen, Katha?

POLLITT: Yes. I actually have a couple of questions. My first one is that, you know, which is language of forcible rape that was in the tax -- no taxpayer funding for abortion bill, that many, many people in Congress voted for, including members of Democrats for Life, Kathy Dahlkemper, for example, voted in favor of that original Ryan and Akin sponsored version of the bill that narrowed the definition of rape to, quote, "forcible rape," unquote.

Now, that doesn`t exactly fit with all this compassion going down. For example, it excludes statutory rape, it excludes all kinds of -- you know, rape by threat or coercion that doesn`t involve, you know, real physical force. And it`s really kind of behind where the law -- you know, the law has advanced beyond that.

So, I`d like to have your thoughts on why this compassion for some of your members did not extend to the full range of rape victims, but only to this very narrow Akin promoted and Paul Ryan promoted definition?

DAY: The original language did not include that definition (ph). That was something that was done, you know, later after the bill text had already been introduced and this did not include that narrow definition. I think it was a political calculation by national right to life to gin up the base and try to get pro lifers more to talk about this issue and raise funds.

So -- and, you know, so the Kathy Dahlkemper and others, you know, really concern about this -- yes, concern about this language being narrow like that and really diminishing, you know, the violence against women when a rape occurs.

HAYES: Can I just say that -- when we talk about exemption, because obviously, I think the majority -- again, public opinion on this is messy, right, but there`s a lot of people in this country who think that you shouldn`t be able to have abortions except for and then a big laundry list of parenthesis, you know, someone you know needs one.

POLLITT: Rape, incest, or need (ph).

HAYES: Right, right. That`s the joke. Rape, incest, or need (ph). But there`s also -- there`s also a suspicion on the part of people who are advocates of outlined abortion that if you create exceptions, right, then they`re going to be used in this disingenuous way. Examples of this.

Here`s Idaho state senator chuck winder, Republican sponsored mandatory ultrasound bill, talking about how physicians should go about ascertaining whether the rape is real, because you don`t want this rape exception being used willy-nilly.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. CHUCK WINDER, (R) IOWA: I would hope that when a woman goes into a physician with a rape issue, that physician will, indeed, ask her about perhaps her marriage. Was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Esther.

ESTHER ARMAH, WBAI-FM`S "WAKE UP CALL": I mean, it`s -- what`s extraordinary to me is, I think, there`s a few things here. One is the exercise of this extraordinary white Male privilege and the protection of men against women who are going to be making claims that of somehow about bringing them down in this particular way, because the idea that you would even put the word "legitimate in front of rape" or the word "forcible in front of rape," somewhat implies that rape by itself is not an act of force, it`s not about violence.

And the reality is so many of the rapes, it`s not the man with the knife and at gunpoint. That`s just not the reality. The statistics bend (ph) out again, again, and again, and again. And so, I think there`s also a very comfortable thing that we`re doing, and it`s been great to put Akin, a six-term congressman, backed by the Tea Party, kind of throw him into the bus.

HAYES: Possible future -- I mean, it is unclear that he is not going to be a senator -

ARMAH: Absolutely. And tea party backed. And it`s very easy to throw him under the bus, but the reality is, I think, the rape culture in this society -- I mean, this is a massive consensus opinion that reflects what he thinks that rape is this kind of time (ph) that women will use, but it`s about dealing and emasculating and negating men in some way.

HAYES: I want you to respond to that, because I think that, to me, -- there`s the abortion can born of this (ph) and there`s a rape can born of this (ph), and I think that there`s been so much excoriation of Akin rightly, but what he said about this category of a thing called legitimate rape is something -- it is an idea that is in the back of a lot of people`s heads in this country.

ARMAH: Absolutely.

HAYES: Kristen Day from the Democratic for Life, I want to thank you for joining us this morning. We really appreciate it. I hope we can have you back.

DAY: Thank you so much.

HAYES: And I want to get into that issue right after we take this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: All right. Esther, before we went to break, I think you raised, to me, what is -- when you kind of drilled down through this last week, watching the fallout from this Todd Akin comment, which -- it`s kinds of remarkable in American politics, right, using this guy who won this contested primary.

No one on the Republican side wanted him to win, because they realized that he had an extreme record, extreme views. He`s bee in the House for six terms. He`s on the science committee, we should note.

ARMAH: Science committee.

HAYES: Claire McCaskill was essentially -- Claire McCaskill, of course, is the Democratic incumbent in Missouri who faces -- who has faced up until this week an uphill battle, I think, for re-election. Wanted -- clearly wanted him to be the nominee for this reason.

ARMAH: Spent money.

HAYES: Ran these hilarious ads. In fact, can we show that ad? This is the sort of genius bit of trolling from the McCaskill campaign during the primary trying to ostensibly running ads against Akin that were a wink, wink, nudge, nudge to the Republican base that he is your man.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The most conservative congressman in Missouri as our senator? Todd Akin, a crusader against bigger government. Akin would completely eliminate the Departments of Education and Energy and privatize Social Security.

Todd`s pro-family agenda would outlaw many forms of contraception, and Akin alone says President Obama is a complete menace to our civilization. Todd Akin, Missouri`s true conservative is just too conservative.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(LAUGHTER)

HAYES: That`s so brilliant. So brilliant.

(CROSSTALK)

BELL: I think I want to vote for Akin.

(LAUGHTER)

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: Pro-family is the smartest part of that. So, what`s happening is, you know, and this was amazing moment where the McCaskill folks knew exactly what they were getting Todd Akin. And so, the impulse is to say this guy is (INAUDIBLE), but the thing -- you raise this point.

The thing he said when he modifies rape with legitimate rape, the subtext of that is a subtext about a belief about what rape looks like, exception (ph) of cultural imagination in which there are a lot of illegitimate rapes, false accusations of rape, rape in which that was actually consensual sex, but then the woman decides that she didn`t want to have consensual sex retroactively and levels this accusation and as extreme as Todd Akin`s views are, that embedded assumption is not, at all, rare.

(CROSSTALK)

ARMAH: Not only is it not rare, but I think what his comments did was allowed this kind of comfort zone, but there`s a real consensus, the shaming of women, the nightmare that is the pursuit of justice for rape victims, the idea that the only trauma that comes from rape is the possibility of getting pregnant as if the actual rape itself is not trauma.

And then, when you add language, attitudes that legitimate or forcible in front of them, you`re consistently going back to the history that you mentioned that really legislation is about protection of the man from women. But I think there`s a second point and the second point is, with the Republican Party, this issue represents ideology versus issues. And when a really specific moment with the --

HAYES: What do you mean by that?

ARMAH: The issue of women and trauma and rape can be absolutely sacrificed to the ideology that pro-family, pro-life, is everything, and that the establishment Republicans who would dare to want to get Akin out of the party will then be backed by people like -- there was a piece in the Christian Science monitor and one quote from Lisa Payne Negha, from the Missouri Grassroots Coalition who said, when I first heard the quote, I was appalled.

This was offensive to women. This was outrageous. But when the establishment tried to get him out, I thought how dare they. So then, she donated to his campaign. And bear in mind, there`s no guarantee that as the result of his comment, Akin will not become the Missouri senator. This assumption that he`s not out, I think, is (INAUDIBLE).

HAYES: He did a press conference yesterday to say that he`s staying in.

ARMAH: Yes.

HAYES: And there is now, Mike Huckabee is kind of leading the chart -- the back lash against the backlash.

(CROSSTALK)

BELL: His big sin was that -- what he said is that he said it out loud. I mean, I feel like that`s the things that a lot of the Republicans agree with him and like, we just say that in the secret meetings. We don`t say that --

(CROSSTALK)

ARMAH: Well, they say it out loud, just not in front of cameras.

BELL: Yes. Not in front of cameras. Yes.

GOLDBERG: One thing I think that`s really important to clarify about this kind of widest forcible or legitimate rape language is so offensive, because I don`t think that progressives or critics of Todd Akin should get into the trap of defending statutory rape laws or pretending that statutory rape is as bad as, you know, kind of -- brutal rapes.

I mean, our statutory rape laws, in many cases, are really preposterous and we have, you know, people being put on --

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: -- and convicted for having sex to seven-year-old (ph).

GOLDBERG: So, the reason that this language is offensive is not because it`s trying to separate out statutory rape from other forms of rape. It`s because like you said it comes out of a whole line of thought that women will often falsely claim rape.

And if you go back -- you know, you mentioned John Wilky (ph) who`s, you know, the latest -- in 1999 wrote this piece about how real rape doesn`t result in conception, also wrote in that piece that when pro-lifers talk about rape, they should always talk about either assault rape or forcible rape.

BELL: Right.

GOLDBERG: And he made two distinctions between statutory rape but also between the many cases in which women -- will also in the many cases in which women claim rape because they`re pregnant and they don`t want to be.

HAYES: Laurie Penny is a British journalist (INAUDIBLE) wrote a really powerful, amazing piece. We`ll put (ph) up in the website. People should read it, about her own rape and the details and the facts of that, which don`t -- which just clearly rape, but also don`t -- that`s not a stranger, a knife with an alley (ph) in this way.

And, you know, if I`m not mistaken, the CDC says only about 15 percent roughly of rapes are rapes of that kind that we would call forcible rape. The vast majority are through coercion, intimidation, pinning, the victim begin to sleep, all of these things, and that whole universe.

I mean, remember, there`s 85,000, I think, legal allegations of rape in the country, and it`s underreported by as much as a factor of 15 if you read the statistics. The overwhelming majority of those don`t comport (ph) to this cultural image. Katha, I want to get your thoughts right after we take a break.

POLLITT: OK.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: -- talking about -- well, I didn`t think we would be talking about this. We`re talking about rape and our cultural expectations and definitions of it, and the kind of -- I think the taboo -- not taboo. The -- the broad misconceptions that are widely shared among people about rape that are pointed to by the comment for which Todd Akin has taken so much heat. Katha, you want to say --

POLLITT: Yes. I have a number of thoughts. One is, we mustn`t forget to mention that marital rape is still very controversial. Very hard to get a conviction. Very-- millions of reasons why a woman wouldn`t bring charges.

GOLDBERG: And Todd Akin has questioned marital rape.

POLLITT: Yes, he did.

HAYES: Also he didn`t -- we should say, he voted for the bill in the state legislature in Missouri. He voted for the bill that would make marital rape a crime.

POLLITT: Philosophically, he said, oh come on. This is ridiculous. I want to say, you know, the whole focus on rape it seems tome in terms of the abortion debate is, really, I don`t want to say it`s a distraction, but it does do the thing of like, OK, if you just, -- you know, you`re some virgin and you`ve just been beaten up and it`s all truly horrible, then we`ll let you have one of our prized abortions.

(LAUGHTER)

BELL: You won!

POLLITT: But you know, if you just -- if you`ve got ten children and this 11th child, you know, is going to, you know, rip your uterus in five pieces, sorry, because there`s no health exception in all of these laws.

HAYES: Right.

POLLITT: And Ryan has said the health exception is so vague, you can drive a mack truck through it.

HAYES: Yes. We have that sound. Let`s play this. This is Paul Ryan making that case.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RYAN: Let me just say this to all of my colleagues who are about to vote on this issue. On the motion to recommit, the health exception is a loophole wide enough to drive a mack truck through it. The health exception would render this ban virtually meaningless.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: And this -- this is a suspicion of these exceptions, and folks who want to ban all abortions, right, that any exception if you give an inch, that these -- these nefarious women who are trying to scam their way into an abortion are going to take a mountain.

BELL: Again, men, shut up.

(LAUGHTER)

BELL: Dude, this has nothing to do with you and your body. Stop talking about it. And I feel like there`s an underlying assumption with Democrats for Life, that somehow that there`s -- there are abortions that are easy, abortions that are hard.

HAYES: Right.

BELL: And I feel like isn`t -- from what I understand, I think they`re all hard choices, and I feel like -- we`re sort of like by putting words in front of rape. I think rape is bad. And --

(CROSSTALK)

BELL: -- like can we just agree that rape is bad? You know, a few words that don`t need modifiers.

ARMAH: I think also you`re talking about legislating the shaming of women when it comes to making health choices. That health is not a choice that is up to them. That it`s something that can be imposed externally by men.

HAYES: And the president said that this week. I mean, he talked about this.

ARMAH: He said rape is rape.

(CROSSTALK)

GOLDBERG: But he also said, you know, that yes, that these are kind of legislators who are mostly men making health decisions for women. \

ARMAH: Including him, even though, you know, he at least was on the right side of the issue. But I think the other thing that was important to me was that Ryan talked about this interfering with religious freedom, and I thought that, you know, the Republicans in terms of their ideology are kind of worshipping at the altar of winning by any means necessary.

Those are the current politics and the politics of winning are making this ideology that`s alert to the right for the Republicans over school the issues that are about women`s bodies and women`s health. So, that`s sacrificing -- you would think they think that sacrificing votes in order to support the ideology, which is what Akin --

(CROSSTALK)

GOLDBERG: What they`re doing is they`re playing a double game, which, you know, they have often done, but it`s being thrown into high relief by this Akin thing where they have one message for their base and they have another message for everyone else. They kind of hope that people don`t listen to each another.

HAYES: Right.

GOLDBERG: You know, George W. Bush was incredibly adept at speaking in code. So, that when he said he -- that when he said he was really opposed to Dred Scott decision, the anti-abortion movement understood that that he meant it as an analogy for Roe vs. Wade, but everybody else thought, of course, you`re opposed to Dred Scott.

And so, you know, Mitt Romney and this current crop of Republicans are less willing -- are less -- either a less adept or just less willing. And so, now, everybody knows what they really think.

HAYES: Katha Pollitt from "The Nation," Esther Armah from WBAI-FM, thanks for being here this morning. Really appreciate it. Michelle, we`re going to see you a little bit later in the program.

GOLDBERG: OK.

HAYES: We want to talk about the persistence of race in American politics. Race and the era of Obama. My story of the week right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: My story of the week today, the problem of the color line. Last week, during a brief tangent in our discussion of Medicare that got at the nature of the Republican base, I was defending the GOP base against generalizations that they are, as a blanket matter races, misogynistic, and homophobic, and then concluded with this statement.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: It is undeniably the case that racist Americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: The problem with that statement is that it`s not true. I was just wrong about what the data say about the way explicit avowed racists are distributed between the two parties.

Economist, Alex Tabarrok, looks at some data from 2002 that show roughly equal percentages of White Democrats and White Republicans around 10 percent, favor laws against interracial marriage, and about 15 percent of White members of both parties agree strongly with the statement, quote, "Blacks shouldn`t be pushy."

He points to overwhelming majorities of both Democrats and Republicans who say they would vote for a Black president and concludes, quote, "It is undeniable that some Americans are racists, but racists split about evenly across the parties." No party has a monopoly on racist.

Political scientist, John Sides (ph), responded to Tabarrok to flesh out the picture that using data from 2008 national election study, he shows that the people who express explicitly racist views such as Black people are lazy or that Black people are unintelligent are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats.

Identification with the Democratic Party tends to decline, he wrote, identification with the Republican Party tends to increase as attitudes towards Blacks become less favorable. When you look at the general social survey data through the prism of ideology, this tendency is even clearer. Razib Khan writing for "Discover" magazine points out that twice as many White conservatives as White liberals would, quote, "strongly oppose a close relatively marrying a Black person."

The good news is that the numbers in both cases are low. Only 20 percent of White conservatives and 10 percent of white liberals. So, I was wrong when I said that, quote, "it is undeniably the case that racist Americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other." That is simply not borne out by the data, it was a moment, frankly, when my own biases led me to say something that wasn`t true.

My bad for saying it, and thank you, internet, for correcting me. But my deeper mistake was focusing on racists as accountable group of individuals as people with an essential core nature that can be analyzed and chartered rather than focusing on how race reverberates through the two different political coalitions and the vast racial disparities in the effects of the policies favored by each of those coalition.

This is a seductive error that the great Jay Smooth has warned us about in his now classic how-to-video about how to talk about race and racism.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAY SMOOTH, FOUNDER, ILLDOCTRINE.COM: Remember the difference between what they did conversation and the what they are conversation. The what they did conversation focuses strictly on the person`s words and actions and explaining why, what they did, and what they said was unacceptable.

The what they are conversation, on the other hand, takes things one step further and uses what they did and what they said to draw conclusions about what kind of person they are. I don`t care what he is, but I need to hold him accountable for what he did. And that`s how we need to approach those conversations about race.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: So, instead of focusing on what conservatives are, we should keep the conversation focused on what they are doing or what they are calling for, and in this realm, there are very -- some very obvious racial asymmetries, the first and most obvious one is an issue we`ve been covering here on UP and on the network more broadly the Republican push in many states.

To impose new restrictions on voting, whether through voter I.D. laws or curtailment on early voting that will disproportionately disenfranchise people of color. One Ohio County chairman told the "Columbus Dispatch," he opposed additional voting hours because, quote, "We shouldn`t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban -- read African-American voter turnout machine."

The reality is, you don`t have to include a single White individual racist in the entire party for them to pursue the strategy. This is a core truth about American politics. We have a multiracial society with two political coalitions. One of those coalitions are Democrats contains almost all of the African-Americans, a majority of Latinos and Asians and a minority of White people.

This is what the other political coalition looks like. The obvious racial disparity you see at the political rallies is also reflected in the institutional makeup of the parties. This is the racial breakdown of the U.S. according to the 2010 census. This is the racial break down of delegates the DNC in 2008. And this is the racial breakdown for delegates to the RNC in 2008.

It is, therefore, not too surprising that in Tuesday`s NBC/"Wall Street Journal" poll, Romney managed to get zero percent from Black voters. And keep in mind, this is a country that is only growing less White. This is what America`s racial composition will look like in 2050, according to the census bureau. Just 50 percent white.

Into a nation already reeling from a total crisis of authority, a cascade of institutional failure and a stalking, corrosive anxiety about decline, the multiracial political party nominated and then managed to get elected the first Black man to run the country in the nation`s history.

And one of the chief paradoxes of his time in office is that despite the fact that the economic misery produced by the crisis and recession has fallen disproportionately on people of color, they, according to Pew, are more optimistic about the future than White people are.

Barack Obama was elected partly on an implicit promise or at least a promise (INAUDIBLE) to suture the still gaping wounds of slavery, White supremacist terrorism, rape, lynching, discrimination, and humiliation that have marked our body politic from its birth. Today, it is a wound that if no longer festering quite so openly is scarred over in such a way that it cannot be scrubbed away or excised over or even covered.

It is part of we are. The turn at the 20th century, W.B. Dubois predicted rightly that the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. Twelve years into the 21st century, on the eve of a nominating convention of the party that destroyed slavery and enshrined the right to vote in due process into the constitution, in the midst of the hard core re-election of the battle of the first Black president, that line seems as inerasable (ph) as ever from our politics.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Good morning from New York. I`m Chris Hayes here with the one and only Melissa Harris-Perry, host of MSNBC`s "Melissa Harris-Perry," which comes on right after the show, Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor for "The Atlantic" magazine, W. Kamau Bell, host of the new FX show, "Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell," and Jay Smooth, who is joining the program, founder of the video blog -- I`ll be checking out -- illdoctrine.com and host of New York`s Underground Railroad hip-shop show on WBAI-FM.

So, here -- an amazing thing happened this week, which is Ta-Nehisi you wrote this incredible essay, very beautifully written as everything you write is, and complex and searching and sophisticated analysis of the kind of paradoxes of our understanding of race in the Obama era, how -- what has changed, what has not, what the expectations of the first Black president had been across the racial divide for White Americans and Black Americans, et cetera.

And then, into the new cycle came Mitt Romney speaking yesterday at a rally.

TA-NEHISI COATES, THEATLANTIC.COM: He planned it.

HAYES: Exactly. Mitt Romney apparently has a contract with the Atlantic publicity bureau.

This is -- this is a joke that he told in Michigan on the stump yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MITT ROMNEY (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know this is the place that I was born and raised.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: All right. So here`s what I think is interesting about that comment. When we see that comment, we see the birther phenomenon, right, there are all sorts of things in American politics in the age of Obama that have an obvious, clear, distinct, and acute racial subtext, but no necessary racial text, right? He`s not saying anything imputably racist, right?

And the way that we understand opposition of Barack Obama, particularly opposition by white people and white conservatives is colored by race in a way that I think can be the source of a lot of confusion, frustration and anger in the body politic because there`s a lot of white folks who are like, look, I just don`t like the guy because we have a $16 trillion debt, or whatever the issue is, why are you calling me a racist?

And so, I guess my first question. What do you think when you see Mitt Romney make that comment?

COATES: Well, I think when I see him make that comment particularly in Michigan, it`s really interesting to me, the subtext of birtherism is a skepticism of citizenship. It`s a long tradition of skepticism of African-American citizenship, cynicism towards African-American citizenship stretches back, you know, literally to the birth of this country.

Mitt Romney, as you said, is from Michigan. I happen to be doing some reporting in Michigan about a year or two ago, and frankly, your neighborhood where Mitt Romney was actually born, Palmer Woods, on the outskirts of Detroit. He`s moved to Bloomfield Hills.

Romney was born in 1947 where broad swaths of Detroit were essentially white set-asides, housing wise. Affirmative action for white people in the worst possible kind of way -- not to help any sort of inequality, to preserve inequality.

HAYES: And extend privilege.

COATES: Right, right. Right.

Everyone wants to see the president`s grades. Everyone skeptical of what affirmative action did for him. How did he get here? We don`t believe him. Is he a citizen?

No one skeptical of Mitt Romney, given the fact of his origin. No one thinks about how he was born, how that housing helped him, how job discrimination, the whole time in which he comes from may have aided his rise. I`m not saying anybody should, but the skepticism that you see towards Obama is not one that`s reflected across the screen. It`s a very specific, particular skeptic.

HAYES: You see, you had this great line yesterday, it says racism is not just hatred, but it`s trust toward some group of people and skepticism toward others. And that`s manifest --

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY, MSNBC HOST: That`s one of the lines in the text that distresses me, the idea that racism is -- because when I read that line, you`re such a gorgeous writer, so seductive, right? It`s true I read the line and it says racism is in part defined by sort of a preferential option for one group and skepticism towards another. But if it is that solely or primarily, than black folks are the biggest racists I know, in the sense of our deep skepticism towards white folks, right?

So, I think we have to make sure we`re layering on top of that set of emotive and psychological sort of puristic preferences, also, the question of power and as you pointed out just now, of policy, the ability to have restricted covenants on your housing and that sort of thing.

But let`s real quick, I want to complicate the birtherism just a bit.

HAYES: Please?

HARRIS-PERRY: Because I think we do a bit of a disservice to the birtherism when and to how it`s operation in race when we take it back to a kind of Jim Crow or slavery moment, because this operates for President Obama I think because he`s insufficiently Negro, and by Negro, I mean specifically African-American as opposed to what he is. Because the thing that President Obama can do that most or the rest of us can`t do is tell you exactly where he is from in Africa, exactly his African people are, exactly what language the people from whom he comes from Africa.

No one ever asks what Michelle Obama`s citizenship is, because she -- not because she has a birth certificate, but rather because she is from a discernible racial history and his is not.

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: I point to two points. The first thing, just to reply to the initial criticism -- just to be clear, the line is "racism is not just."

HARRIS-PERRY: Right.

COATES: So, it`s not that I would not certainly confine racism just to that. And I think you do. You make a lot of good points. I think Obama -- God, I hate using this word -- exoticism, quote-unquote, "exoticism".

HARRIS-PERRY: Right.

COATES: For a lack of a better term, exoticism does make it a lot easier to, you know, directly go at it that way. Having said that, I think that he was just black, I wouldn`t be shocked if there was some other way of questioning his citizenship, maybe not birtherism but something different.

W. KAMAU BELL, HOST, "TOTALLY BIASED": And also, if he was just black, which I feel weird saying.

HARRIS-PERRY: Yes, it`s also an odd thing.

BELL: If he was just black, he wouldn`t be the president. I think his exoticism is part of the thing that gave white people of this country like, I don`t have to feel guilty about him, because he`s from Africa. We didn`t own him.

HARRIS-PERRY: It shows that we did, but just through his white people.

BELL: It`s so complicated.

HARRIS-PERRY: So it`s complex.

HAYES: There`s two things at play here, right? The way in which -- the way in which opposition to the birtherism, right, or let me show the new welfare. Do we have the welfare ad that Mitt Romney is running?

Here are ads that Mitt Romney is running, I would say completely without a factual basis, just to set up the policy thing here. Governors have been asking for waivers to experiment with the method by which they implement TANF, which is a welfare reform bill signed in the 1990 by Bill Clinton and pushed by Newt Gingrich forever. In fact, Mitt Romney joins in a letter asking governors to do that.

Barack Obama`s HHS department has granted authority for these waivers to experiment, and the Romney campaign has seized on that as an example of undoing welfare reform. And these are some of the ads that he`s been running.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, ROMNEY CAMPAIGN AD)

BELL: My mother didn`t learn to read or write, so she didn`t have real skills to fall back on, so she ended up on the welfare system. And that`s how I grew up.

President Obama stripping work requirement out of welfare, I think the problem with that is there`s been so many success stories of the welfare reform of the `90s, where families that might otherwise have stayed stuck in the cycle of dependency.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: OK. So, what`s so fascinating about this and what gets to this conundrum, right, is that again, we are dealing on terrain that is facially race neutral. It`s a white person in that ad. But there are no black appear in this welfare ad. And yet the history of arguments about the evil of redistributing your tax dollars to some other lazy person who won`t work, is bound up.

And just to give a sense of how far back this go, this is just amazing. 1866 cartoon, which is a broadside from a congressional campaign happening in Pennsylvania at the time, during reconstruction. It`s an attack advocating the election -- Hiser Climber (ph) for governor for Pennsylvania on a white supremacy platform and it`s attacking the Freedman`s Bureau, an agency that keep the Negro in idleness at the expense of the wise men, twice vetoed by the president and in the back, the pillars of Freedman`s Bureau, which are no work, sugar plums, indolence, white women, apathy, white sugar, idleness, fishballs, clams, stews and pies.

So, you have to -- and what happens is --

BELL: I would like to improve racism has been here for a while.

(LAUGHTER)

HARRIS-PERRY: Just established.

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: It`s very excite thing.

So, right, so this gets to this problem because when we have this conversation about this, one side says why are you accusing us of making a racial appeal? We`re just talking about welfare, we`ve got a white guy in the ad and then it seems like we`re in the terrain we talked about in the video I just shouted out, about the what you are conversation, because the what you did conversation can`t be explicated just within the boundary of what`s on television screen.

JAY SMOOTH, ILLDOCTRINE.COM: Right. I mean, I think it perfectly simplifies the conundrum that Ta-Nehisi describes the president is trying to navigate. And I think -- you know, I cringe a little bit when that video I made is presented as a literal how-to video because, of course, there`s no catch all way to always discuss race constructively and effectively. It`s almost always as painful and awkward.

And we see in situations like this where things have shifted no covert racism, being the dominant form instead of overt, and you want to call out something, because they are clear implications there. But if you call it out, then you`re also falling into the trap of getting trolled and letting them play the role of being the victim and saying, look at those liberals playing the race card on us again.

So, it`s a lose/lose situation that the president has been struggling with.

HAYES: And that is exactly what the essay is about, is that how he`s navigated that.

How has the president navigated the fact that he is constantly being trolled in some ways, right? He`s constantly being trolled to, quote, "play the race card." Another phrase that I just despise, but we`ll invoke ironically here.

COATES: I was at war with myself writing this piece, and some level, as I said in the piece and I said before, I would like your president of the United States to talk more about your race. But, you know, you look at what happened with the Henry Louis Gates thing. I mean, it`s good that health care got pass. That wasn`t directed to health care.

I was out in this forum, and I was moderating and the people who are on the phone were way to the left of me, even though I consider myself pretty far left. They were to the left of me, they were all African-American. And to a man and to a woman, all of them said, he shouldn`t have said anything. That`s not his job.

HAYES: About Henry Louis Gates?

COATES: Yes. I was totally, totally stunned by that. You know, at the time I was of the mind, he should have said more, you know? So to be honest, I`ve been back and forth on it, you know?

HARRIS-PERRY: So, I guess part of what I was surprised about in your piece in terms of the way that you take on the president as -- in terms of his race talk or --

HAYES: Or lack thereof.

HARRIS-PERRY: -- or lack thereof, I guess is really two things. One is whether or not in the role of president, we expect the president of the United States to address race. So for me, the answer to that is yes. So, to the extent that I want President Obama to address race, I want Bill Clinton, President Clinton, to stand up.

Because part of what is irritating to me about this whole completely false welfare line is that policy, the one that President Obama now has to defend in order to -- is itself a racially disparate policy when Bill Clinton signed that welfare to work act what he did. What he did was to make poor mothers have to go to work, rather than to care for their children -- at the same time, the conservatives are claiming that motherhood is more important than work.

I mean -- so Bill Clinton is let off having to do that. And so I think there is a way when we call for President Obama to speak specifically on race, we allow Mitt Romney off of it, we allow Paul Ryan off.

So, the question is, should a president who is going to be the president of a diverse nation have to speak about it?

And real quick, I guess I am so surprised that you don`t see him doing it. Because you are such a beautiful reader of textual analysis and I feel like President Obama is performing race talk regularly, in ways that are not just dog whistled, but the sort of code switching that allows him just in his body to be doing race at all times.

COATES: I do say that. I wrote about that in the piece. I think that was a significant subtext. I talk about explicitly, in terms of policy, that sort of thing. The thing to keep in mind is President Obama said himself that we couldn`t ignore race, that it should be explicitly talking about.

So, I don`t think in asking them to talk about, that lets Mitt Romney or the Republican Party off the hook at all. I think I spent a considerable portion of the episode -- I`m sorry, of the essay, keeping them on the hook, trying to put them on the hook.

HAYES: I want to point to my favorite example of the president`s code switching -- physical code switching. This is shaking hands, have you seen this, with the U.S. Dream Team. This is him -- how are you, sir? Good to see you. That`s it right there.

Talk more about it after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: All right. So there is a quote recently in "Black Enterprise" magazine that epitomizes the line the president has taken, explicitly this issue of -- are you, Barack Obama, first black president, doing enough for black America? Are you explicitly targeting policies sufficiently to the black community?

And he says, "I want all Americans to have opportunity. I`m not the president of the black America. I`m president of the United States America. But the programs that we have put in place have been directed to those folks who are least able to get financing, through conventional means," et cetera, et cetera.

So, this is the line, right? I`m not the president of black America.

And you have this I thought you had a funny riff on your show about -- you basically were like you are president of black America. I know you are president of black America is and I know that you know. And I know you know you can`t say that. That`s me just doing the W. Kamau Bell show, even though you are sitting right here.

(CROSSTALK)

BELL: Yes. I think we -- that`s the frustration I feel sometimes, is like he is the president of black America. Like, dude, you know that you are, and you know that`s why we elected you because we wanted to elect, we wanted to see one of us in office. And we`re -- we are at the very -- we`re the base of Barack Obama, we`re his base.

And I think -- you would see George W. Bush talk directly to his base sometime in clear tones in way Barack does through code switching but doesn`t talk as directly to his base. And I think sometimes as a black person, that can be frustrating.

HARRIS-PERRY: What other American president, when he tells the story of American greatness, because they all do, right? They all do sort of here`s why America is great.

What other American president has made the contributions, the life stories of black Americans and black women in particular, the core of how he tells that story? On the night that he`s elected, he stands there in Grant Park in Chicago and he tells the story of America through the eyes of a woman named Anna Cooper who was a 90-some --

HAYES: Right.

HARRIS-PERRY: I mean, I hear you, OK, maybe he doesn`t. For real like who else ever in the history of American politics, when they were just having a talk, made us the center of it? But I`m not sure I buy the story that he doesn`t talk about race. Who else in the middle of their campaign suspended and was like, let`s just chat about race?

SMOOTH: I mean, I think he does talk about race, both in the winks and nods that you laid out in your show and you describe, and he explicitly talks about the importance of race and the positive examples you cite and shows how his existence is an example of the American exceptionalism that people say he doesn`t believe in.

But I do wish, I share Ta-Nehisi`s wish that he would explicitly discuss the impact of racism and racial inequities on people, especially since, as you also pointed, he does sometimes when he speaks to black audiences, he sort of delivers these pull your pants up Cosbyisms --

COATES: Yes. Like he --

(CROSSTALK)

SMOOTH: But there`s a place for that, but also not giving the context to the external obstacles as explicitly kind of hurts a bit.

COATES: Right. He does have a crafted political policy message towards black people. It involves stops playing video games, it involves better parenting, it involves studying, you know? Things that we can all endorse, I`m happy he`s saying that. These --

HAYES: You do like video games, let`s be clear.

COATES: I`m a little upset about the video games.

But, look, he tends to shy away from the systemic critique that really should go with that.

HAYES: OK. But let me say, I found the Henry Louis Gates moment really instructive and you wrote about that, but I also think it affected the way they comported themselves afterward. The Henry Louis Gates moment was -- the moment I was in the room during the press conference, reaction was so honest, right? It came from such a -- a pure, just honest place, it wasn`t at all particularly radical, anything he was saying. He was saying a pretty mundane thing, that you shouldn`t be pulled out of your house and the craziness that ensued. I feel like they are like, all right, enough of this.

HARRIS-PERRY: Isn`t it possible that as wordsmiths, as journalists, as writers, as professors, that we are overly interested in what the president is saying as a set of analyst tools? So, to suggest he doesn`t have a systemic critique at the same time that he is, you know, making sure that the Pigford settlement finally goes through to get money to black farmers, that he is finally reducing settlement disparity, that he is passing Lilly Ledbetter, which has a disproportionate impact on black families, because black women are more likely to be the heads of household, that he`s passing health care reform bill.

HAYES: Affordable Care Act and Medicaid, right.

HARRIS-PERRY: I don`t know how much I care about what he talks about, as long as he`s using systemic tools. This goes back to the sort of what I said versus what I do?

COATES: I think that`s perfectly defensible. But I don`t think any of us is saying he hasn`t done anything for blacks. I definitely would not say that. I would never argue that he`s done nothing for African-Americans.

BELL: I feel sorry for Barack Obama in a lot of ways, because I feel like black people sat around for 40 years in this country imagining the black president.

HAYES: Yes, you`re right about that, as a cosmic joke.

BELL: We thought that when we got a black president, we would just be able to sometimes like save me, black president. Save me! And he would fly in and save us in a moment`s notice. And we -- he`s not that guy. I`m not saying --

HARRIS-PERRY: That`s what you think? I actually think we thought exactly this -- we figured, in fact so much so that initially in the primaries, we were like I`m not sure if I can vote for him, because I`m afraid they`ll assassinate him. I actually think we expected exactly this. That we figured we would elect an African-American as president and there would be massive resistance.

And the reason we figured that is because that`s what happened in the reconstruction.

HAYES: Yes, exactly. But there`s two things here. I want to get back to something you just said about the massive resistance, because there`s a theory on the right that when you said -- you said something very clearly, like we voted for him, we, African-Americans and right now support for him is 100 percent according to the most recent poll, right, because of -- because of very obvious affinity, a very deep, profound symbolic --

HARRIS-PERRY: And a really bad opponent.

HAYES: And there`s a theory, and I think it`s really the theory of Mitt Romney and theory of conservatives, which is that Barack Obama`s election was of the product of, you know, the deep, you know, African-Americans rightly unjustly feeling a connection to the first black president and white liberal guilt, wanting to make this historical moment happen and the fact there was a crisis, and all of the symbolism, put to a person who actually isn`t up to the task, that actually he`s not that good of a president.

I`m not saying I believe this. I`m saying that this is the critique that the right gives, right, that this was all this kind of symbolic politics, it wasn`t actually substantive, the reason he won. And I want to hear you respond to that because that is -- that is the argument that sort of integrates the historical nature of the presidency and kind of uses it against him, right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Yes, (INAUDIBLE) black president. It`s on the noses nose.

HARRIS-PERRY: Do we have $5,000?

(LAUGHTER)

HAYES: Right. So, there is a critique -- I mean, this sort of -- I want to be clear to people who are attacking me on Twitter. I do not believe the theory of the case I just gave. I was representing the theory that is propounded I think by conservatives about -- essentially Obama as a kind of affirmative action figure, right, that essentially he was the beneficiary of a lot of white guilt and put him in over his head and now -- and sort of now, you, white America, you expiated your guilt by voting for him the first time.

This is really I think what a lot of the appeal is. You voted for him the first time because you wanted a black president. You see that he`s over his knead, now time to get --

BELL: We on the show, "Totally Biased," we were writing a bit of a commercial and the whole idea for commercial was like white people, saying we gave it a shot. And then we saw the commercial, not as a fake commercial, like, oh, I guess we need to try harder.

(CROSSTALK)

BELL: We were going to make a joke about it.

HARRIS-PERRY: You know, I think the -- my one angst when we suggest that the pushback against President Obama is primarily about race, my concern about that is to me, the logical extension of that argument, for progressives is, therefore, we can only elect white progressives, that a block body will drive white people so frickin` nuts, right? They`re going to go -- I said fricking.

(CROSSTALK)

HARRIS-PERRY: That they`re going to be unable, we`re never going to get health care, any of these things passed, because they`re just going to be reacting to racism. And therefore, don`t ever put any more black bodies --

HAYES: That`s a subtext in this --

HARRIS-PERRY: Yes. And the real concern about that is like just the empirics of it. They impeached Bill Clinton. They impeached the white guy.

HAYES: OK. I`m glad you brought that up, because that brings to mind, right, when there`s this argument about how much is it racial animus, when we talk about the Tea Party backlash? When we talked about everything that Barack Obama and Charles Pierce wrote this piece being like, I have seen -- you know, I`ve never experienced a president who America felt like he owed them something, that he there was because of their good grace or something, and, you know, when you compare the backlash to Barack Obama in many it looks remarkably similar to the backlash of Bill Clinton, right? I mean --

COATES: I think the most important thing about that is I tried to make this point in the piece. Bill Clinton himself is racialize, he`s already racialized. Barack Obama just personifies, he just brings it to the floor, you know, even more so.

If Barack Obama was caught up in the same type (ph) that Bill Clinton had been caught, I think he would have run out of office. Immediately --

BELL: I mean she would hold him accountable in a way. I didn`t mean to illegally killing.

HARRIS-PERRY: But see, even there, even there, the idea that black women hold accountable their partners in a way that white women don`t is again empirically false. Black women are more likely to be victimized by domestic violence than are white women. Black women are the highest fastest growing population of new HIV infections. Why? Because we are so rather die, we will literally die, like I think we have to be careful in this creation of these -- like I think that -- the idea that you can`t attack us, we can`t be bothered.

And so, why isn`t President Obama bucking up, because that`s what black people do. We just fight, we`re just angry, we just talk, we just tell it. No, it`s a stereotype.

HAYES: And it`s really frustrating, this kind of stereotyping on white liberals, like even these statements like Michael Moore, like we thought we were voting for the black guy, this Bill Maher, this kind of like essential blackness, that liberals --

(CROSSTALK)

HARRIS-PERRY: Which is racist.

HAYES: That he`s gangster, or something like that is the core of blackness, is like confrontational, like being confrontational.

BELL: When you said that evidence shows equal racism in both parties, every black person went yes.

HARRIS-PERRY: Yes.

HAYES: Yes. It`s very funny. You know what? It`s very funny. Yes, I`m glad you said it because when I said that, and I was wrong, an offhanded comment. The reason I spent a lot of time correcting it. I was wrong.

But the people that went nuts on me on Twitter were white conservatives than black people. I have shown up at dinner parties, gone over to meet the parents, more than one liberal household. Let me tell you.

The thing I want to turn attention to here and to me the part of the essay I thought was the most bracing, or -- is a discussion of the way you talk about Shirley Sherrod, and everybody remembers the Shirley Sherrod incident. Forget about what the president has to navigate, how black citizens navigate their relationships with the first black president and their relationship of criticism or support or frustration.

And the story you tell about Shirley Sherrod, the last line of the piece, not to ruin the ending, spoiler alert, is basically she talks to you, but I don`t want to hurt the president. She got screwed over. I think we can all agree, like she really got screwed over in the whole thing, the president, himself`s fault or his whole administration, like ultimately the buck stops here.

But her conclusion from the whole episode was, whatever happens, I don`t want to be used as a political cajole in any way to protect --

COATES: Well, I think, you know, some context is really important there. Shirley Sherrod is working in Albany, Georgia. She is in it. I mean, really, really, really in it.

And one of the things she said to me was there was this constant experience after it happened, where people who -- before did not like her, would come up to her, oh, I`m so sympathetic, oh, I`m so sorry he did that to you. I`m so sorry -- you know, with an obvious anti Obama bias,

And so there is a way in which she could be used within that specific community. Not even nationally, within a specific community to help her, despite legitimate anger by the way she has toward the White House.

HAYES: And that gets to this sort of fodder question, right, which is criticism as fodder for the critics, and I want, Melissa, I want to clarify.

We`ll take a quick break and we`ll be back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: No, but, Melissa, you want to respond, I mean, about this -- we were talking about this issue of the ammunition problem, right? If you criticize the president openly, you are giving ammunition of a cast of people who are your ideological political enemies and have vowed to destroy him. And so, there is a certain amount of self-censorship that promotes.

HARRIS-PERRY: Yes. I mean, there`s the ammunition problem. But again, I think I would go back to our conversation what`s happening discursively versus what`s happening in terms of actual pushback against the president, the administration, all of that. But I do think this gets -- what happens, we tell the story that African-Americans are unwilling to critique the president because African-Americans are his key supporters.

But as a matter of evidence, take Sherrod, for example. Actually, for me the big critique is not of the president or administration, it`s of the NAACP. It`s of Ben Jealous on hearing the Shirley Sherrod story tweets initially, "She should be ashamed of herself."

COATES: Right.

HARRIS-PERRY: So, maybe, as you point out --

COATES: She got enough anger for the NAACP --

HARRIS-PERRY: Check it out. Maybe not your average viewer doesn`t know who Shirley Sherrod is, but if you`re the head of the NAACP and you hear the last Sherrod and you hear the state of Georgia, you should start connecting Charles Sherrod and Georgia in your head like ding, ding, ding, like I found the prize, 101.

HAYES: Right.

HARRIS-PERRY: So, like their failure to catch that connection was for me is far more insidious.

But the whole point is that Sherrod and other local activists like her -- I mean, my husband spent some part of the early part the Obama administration actually in a lawsuit that had begun in the Bush administration, but continued to the Obama administration against HUD for a set of housing policies.

There are people doing work all over the country who are making pushbacks, who are trying to do work, you know, organizing. That`s not the same thing as sitting on television and saying I think the president is fundamentally --

HAYES: Why not, though?

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: The thing you do -- if your job is to go on television --

HARRIS-PERRY: That`s not how conservatives won the movement because when conservatives win, what they do is they have that fight, they get the push, they actually don`t -- I mean, even as Bush -- even as Bush complete failed to overturn Roe vs. Wade, you didn`t hear the conservative white wing of the party attack him, what they did is they took state by state, each and every state.

(CROSSTALK)

COATES: That factual correction that I got to make. Shirley Sherrod actually does critique the president.

HAYES: In the piece she does.

(CROSSTALK)

COATES: She`s not like rolling over.

HARRIS-PERRY: No.,

COATES: I think her point was -- and she said this in a very early initial e-mail and then we have follow-up after that. I have to be conscious about what I`m saying, how I`m saying it, who I`m saying it to. But she was very clear with the critique.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Good point.

HAYES: Jay, what do you think about this sort of ammunition point?

SMOOTH: I mean, it`s definitely a tightrope walk. That`s something that would be the case as far as who you are rooting for in your party in general. But I think there`s other layers of it for sure because there was always a dichotomy for me.

I had tremendous hopes for the symbolic importance that Obama would have in terms of getting I elected. I had more pragmatic, cynical hopes as far as what he`d be able to accomplish, in terms of policies and what he would be able to do in his administration.

But -- I mean, I think there is a desire to preserve that symbolic impact he would have that makes him at times to be reticent to talk about things like drones, so on, which is -- I think there is -- you know, it`s a tightrope walk, being frank about the ways in which one is critically and then speaking in his defense against things he`s facing in terms of massive resistance -- you`re reticent to talk about that as well.

HAYES: And particularly you feel so many critiques are unfair. I mean, that`s part of the problem, right?

SMOOTH: Right.

HAYES: And I said this off-air, let me say this on air, which is that like, look, I covered the labor movement. There are a lot of unions that are total disasters. They are completely dysfunctional entities. And I covered some of them, right?

There is a desire to not write a story if you are on the left and say, man, this union, what a total mess, because the union movement is massively important, the soul of the American left for years, and there is a determined effort to extinguish it, to destroy it, to wipe it out of existence. And up against that.

And so you think that goes through your mind as are you modulating, when you`re talking about -- the thing I want to respond about the FOX News thing and this -- we see this argument. And I see it on my Twitter feed all the time, I`m sure you get it. It`s about this international argument about Barack Obama, is he sellout? Is he pragmatic? All this stuff, right?

When you look -- when you point to the conservative`s example, I think about the Iraq war and I always saying to myself, I wish the conservatives who oppose the Iraq war hasn`t gotten behind the president. I wish they had really taken to the air waves and killed that thing before it happened. And I think there is a danger to falling in line. There is a real danger to falling in line.

HARRIS-PERRY: Wait. But I guess my point, we`re not falling -- to suggest the absence of an all-day 5 five-point critique to the president`s agenda is falling in line is my concern.

So, I guess I just wanting to point out that for me, one of the great -- as Professor Cornel West might say, one of the great gifts of blackness to America has been the ability to both maintain an incredibly and uniquely American optimism about the project that is the American story and to operate always with a characteristic (ph) of suspicion about how we`re actually living out the American story.

So we love the Declaration of Independence and have a lot of criticism of the Constitution which was meant to bring that thing into existence.

HAYES: Let me read just quickly from your essay, which sort of makes this point, "For most of American history, our political system was premise on two conflicting facts. One, an oft-stated love of democracy, the other, the undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government. In warring against that paradox, African-Americans have been historically restricted to the realm of protest and agitation."

"But when President Barack Obama pledged," and this is about Trayvon Martin, "to get to the bottom of exactly what happened, he was not protesting or agitating, right? This is the first he was not appealing to federal power. He was employing it. The power was black, and in certain quarters, was received as such."

More on this after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: All right. To kind of punch home this conversation. There is something you wanted to say about Shirley Sherrod.

COATES: Yes, I was going to go back to this.

Melissa, this point you made about NAACP, which I think is so, so true, they should have known.

HAYES: And Ben Jealous did apologize.

HARRIS-PERRY: Yes.

COATES: He did apologize.

(CROSSTALK)

COATES: The thing that always impressed me about Barack Obama is he`s not just an African-American president. He`s really just right up on the experience, he knows, he`s smart, intellectual, shouldn`t he have known? Shouldn`t somebody close to him have known?

HARRIS-PERRY: Sure.

COATES: I mean, that`s what really got me like appalling about that. I mean, not to let the NAACP off the hook.

HARRIS-PERRY: No, just to say, I have no idea whether or not President Obama in and of himself knew or not, right? What I know empirically is the NAACP. So, whether it was actually Ben Jealous or whoever tweets for Ben Jealous.

COATES: Somebody close to him. I mean, does that say anything?

HARRIS-PERRY: I`m not surprise that Tom Vilsack didn`t know that name Sherrod. I mean, like, did you see Tom Vilsack? I`m not surprised about that.

HAYES: I want to -- there is a passage from "The Audacity of Hope," which I think we should end with the president`s words, he is such an incredible writer, where he is talking -- he`s talking about a lesson he learned about how black politicians talk about race. This is from his book written in 2006. Check it out.

He says, "I remember once sitting with one my Democratic colleagues in the Illinois State Senate as we listened to another fallow senator -- an African-American whom I`ll call John Doe who represented a largely inner city district -- launch into a lengthy and passionate peroration on why the elimination of a certain program was a case of blatant racism. After a few minutes, the white senator, who had one of the chamber`s most liberal voting records turned to me and said, `You know what the problem is with John? Whenever I hear him, he makes me feel more white.`

In defense of my black colleague, I pointed out that it`s not easy for black politicians to gauge the right tone to take -- too angry? Not angry enough? -- when discussing the enormous hardship facing his or her constituents, still my white colleague`s comment was instructive."

That moment in the book is kind of a -- you know, profound one, because it`s about learning a lesson as a black politician who is in a world on the south side of Chicago, where if that was all he was going to be, he wouldn`t have to negotiate the sort of cross racial appeals as much, right? He could have been continued to represent Hyde Park for a long time. Maybe run for Congress, but --

HARRIS-PERRY: Well, he did. And --

HAYES: He got it handed to him.

HARRIS-PERRY: He says he was insufficiently black.

HAYES: And the reporting from that campaign is amazing. One of my colleagues, Ted McClellan (ph) of "Chicago Reader" when I was there, wrote a piece about that. But this -- that portion is omitted from the abridged version of the audio book. Interesting.

Nice find, segment producer Todd Cole.

All right. Melissa Harris-Perry, are you going to take off to get ready for your own show, which is coming up next. I`m sure the staff will --

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: Thank you for being here.

HARRIS-PERRY: Absolutely.

HAYES: What do we know now that we didn`t know last week? My answer is after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HARRIS-PERRY: All right. So, what do we know now that we didn`t know last week?

We know now just how bad the recovery has been for the middle class. According to research firm Sentier LLC, we know median household income fell 2.6 percent in real terms in the 18 months that make up the official term of the great recession. Median incomes have fallen an additional 4.8 percent since June 2009, the official start of the so-called recovery.

We know despite the fact that unemployment remains at 8 percent, this campaign focused shockingly little on job agenda and full employment. We know Mitt Romney uses poor economic news as a political cajole to attack President Obama`s record. But we can predict with a great deal of certainty that the agenda he and the House Republican Caucus are advocating will only erode the economic prospects of the middle class and further erode the economic prospects of the middle class.

And even as their prospects dim, we now know that middle class Americans are more generous in their charitable contributions than the affluent. We already knew from the variety of social psychological studies that those better off economically tend to be less empathetic but we know how this plays out in dollars and cents. According to a new study from "The Chronicle of Philanthropy," household that is earn between $50,000 and $75,000 annually give an average of 7.6 percent of their discretionary income to charity, while those who earn over $100,000 give an average of 4.2 percent of their discretionary income to charity.

We also know that, quote, "Rich people who live in neighborhoods with many other wealthy people give smaller share of their incomes to charity than rich people who live in more economically diverse communities. On people making more than $200,000 a year account for more than 40 percent of the taxpayers in the zip code, wealthy residents give an average of 2.8 percent of discretionary income to charity compared with an average of 4.2 percent for all item earners earning $200,000 or more," end quote.

And, finally, we now know not one but two local TV stations, one in Denver, the other in Ohio, were asked by Romney campaign staffers not to ask any questions about Congressman Todd Akin or abortion before they were granted interviews with Mitt Romney. We know that for both candidates, the terms of access have increasingly shifted in favor of the campaigns. And we know that citizens increasingly get their news from campaigns directly rather than in the media.

The Pew Research Center found that, quote, "reporters and talk show personalities account for half of the assertions of the candidate`s character and biography as they did 12 years ago," 27 percent versus 50 percent in 2000. At the same time, campaigns, their surrogates and allies account for nearly half these themes -- 48 percent up from 37 percent in 2000.

We also know that reporters competing for access and scoops on the increasingly overpopulated national political beat face a fundamental collective action problem when individually bargaining over the terms of access to campaigns we know a bit of genuine journalistic solidarity for reporters collectively refuse certain conditions would solve the problem. But we also know collective action and solidarity are dirty words.

Michelle Goldberg from "Newsweek" and "The Daily Beast" is back with us at the table. I want to find out what my guests now know when the week began.

Michelle, we begin with you.

MICHELLE GOLDBERG, NEWSWEEK: We know that nobody has ever asked to see Mitt Romney`s birth certificate and I think more significantly we know that he`s willing to go there very much unlike John McCain four years ago.

HAYES: Yes, I have been pondering, thinking, discussing this moment. I was on Rachel`s show last night and we talked about it. It just seemed so bizarre to me. I think Rachel`s theory is essentially it`s trolling, it`s a way of trying to provoke accusations of racism because of the politics of people accusing a white person of being racist down to their benefit even if the explicit birtherness doesn`t.

GOLDBERG: Yes, it`s hard -- I mean, some people said it must have been a slip-up and Mitt Romney does tend to say ridiculous offensive things when he`s speaking extemporaneously, but at the same time it was, you know, it obviously delighted the crowd. And that`s actually -- he`s defending it on the grounds, the crowd loved it, you know, which says quite a bit about the crowd.

HAYES: Yes.

Ta-Nehisi?

COATES: We know that -- well, let me back up a little bit. In 2008, there was a hope there would be a reform of the Republican Party, that it would moderate a little bit. We know that`s not going to happen. Actually, what`s happening is moving further right and if there`s going to be any reform, it`s a long, long ways off. I think the birther comment, this whole forcible rape business in relation to abortion really evidences that.

HAYES: Yes. We`re going to talk -- tomorrow, we`re going to talk about the Republican convention and the Republican platform, which NBC News has gotten its hand on the draft version of that platform. The platform people, oh, Mitt Romney, all these people, Reince Priebus, don`t worry about the platform, nothing to see here.

But that`s the expression of the --

(LAUGHTER)

COATES: That`s the platform you`re running on.

HAYES: As the party grows more disciplined than we have seen the Republican Party that conducts itself with tremendous discipline, more party-line votes, particularly governs from the House, instead of looking at the hazy details that Mitt Romney won`t give, look at the platform for what they are pledging themselves to do. We`re going to do that tomorrow.

Kamau?

BELL: I learned as my friend (INAUDIBLE) say that the Republican Party is not a logic-base system. And that if you`re going to talk about forcible rape and legitimate rape and also gin up birtherism comment, that I really feel like I don`t trust you to operate heavy machinery for the outside without adult supervision.

HAYES: I should say, just as a factual stipulation, that the Akin comment was condemned widely across the Republican circles, basically every Republican starting from -- working its way up to Mitt Romney took them about 36 hours condemned the comment. We should be clear on that.

BELL: I would argue that they condemn him again saying it out loud on camera. That the thing in there is actually, I believe that`s what they believe.

HAYES: J. Smooth?

SMOOTH: I mean, I think as he said, even though the dog whistle may have been accidental, he was cleaning his dog whistle and it just went off, I think they have, afterwards, it had the intended effect of a dog whistle, there was a rousing ovation, and they played it as if it was intentional. I think the Republicans are going to cast their lot with playing up fear and pandering and sort of meta trolling pandering as far as they can, which makes me as a Republican, I would feel the way that I felt as a Knicks fan, that you`re sort of instead of building something that can make you a viable party for the future, we are sort of training for that 38-year-old player with two broken knees and seeing if he has one more chance.

I mean, -- they`re casting their lot with going for a shrinking pool of people that you can pander to that way that in the long term I don`t think bodes well.

HAYES: Well, when you talk about these demographic projections, and this is the point that noble people make all the time. But if you look at the immigration part of this platform is extremely radical. I mean --

My thanks to Michelle Goldberg from "Newsweek" and "The Daily Beast," Ta-Nehisi Coates from "Atlantic", W. Kamau Bell from the new show "Totally Biased" on FX, Thursday nights at 11:00 Eastern, and IllDoctrined.com`s Jay Smooth. Thanks for getting UP.

Thank you for joining us today for UP.

Join us tomorrow, Sunday morning at 8:00 when we`ll have Michael Steele, former RNC chairman, live with us from Tampa to preview the Republican convention, along with Salon.com`s Joan Walsh, whose news book is called "What`s the Matter with White People: Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was".

Coming up next is, of course, "MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY." On MHP today, Melissa takes a look at Paul Ryan`s workout routine and examines whether he and his new boss Mitt Romney are fit for office. See what I did there.

Plus, a trip home to New Orleans and a tour of the new Harris-Perry home that has just three walls.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.END

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